Reinteract on Windows

So I thought I’d try booting up one of my systems into Windows today and see how much work it would be to get Reinteract running. It turned out to be completely an exercise in clicking through installers (9 of them). If you are already a Windows Python user, the amount of things you need to install will be less.

Follow the instructions in the PyGTK FAQ to install Python, GTK+, and PyGTK.

You can play around, or use File/Open to open the examples from reinteract/examples

It seems to work pretty well. Caveats I know about:

replay and the “play” example won’t work. (An easy project for somebody who knows how to get Python to play sounds on Windows)

There’s a bug in the cairo backend for matplotlib-0.90.1 which will cause non-square images to not work. (The images in the imshow example are square…) It’s pretty easy to fix up: just edit C:\Python25\Lib\site-packages\matplotlib\backends\backend_cairo.py and in draw_image(), change “rows, cols, row*4” to “cols, rows, cols*4”.

Saving over an existing file doesn’t work (should be an easy fix)

The GTK+ and PyGTK versions in the installers referenced above are a bit out of date. So they aren’t exactly what I’ve been testing with, though they seem to work fine. (There’s one bug triggered when deleting multiple lines and results, but that’s also in the latest released version of GTK+, 2.12.1, and only fixed in subversion.)

skoob: no it’s not just you. There’s a related effect you see live … if you change the function from say, cos(2*xx) to cos(xx), you a really strong impression of animation between the two endpoints, even if you know that no such thing is going on.